The Walled Garden by Kevin Casey

Puttering about his three-room apartment,
the old man does little more than tend
to the clear floret of a shot glass
with his handled jug. An amber ashtray
sprouts from a brass stand, a vine of smoke
reaching toward the dull glow of a shaded window.

Across the room, the radio alighted
on the sideboard holds its crackling note
above the boulevard’s steady chorus.
After years in this urban hermitage,
loneliness has lost its meaning
to the inadvertent anchorite,
his life now pared away to a spare
and accidental habit of prayer.



Kevin Casey has contributed poems to Hartskill Review, The Orange Room Review, Rust + Moth, San Pedro River Review, and other publications. His new chapbook “The wind considers everything --” was recently published by Flutter Press, and another from Red Dashboard is due out later this year."

on the day the roofers came by Wanda Morrow Clevenger

          for Stan Barker

I don’t write on
days when I hear
a friend up
and dies––too soon
and cliché 
the roofers pound
I expect light fixtures
to crash down
walls to fall in

gray shingles drop
are gathered
away
ZZ Top’s “Legs”
throbs from
an open van
a compressor makes
an intermittent frizz

I drink honey tea
I read social sympathy
I pay bills
the washer/dryer
agitates/spins
I chase dust

tomorrow
the roofers
will pound the last
fresh shingles on – I’ll
look up and pretend
all is put to right 



Wanda Morrow Clevenger is a Carlinville, Illinois, native who will relatively soon be a Kansas resident. She has published over 300 pieces of work in 122 print and online publications. Her debut book This Same Small Town in Each of Us released in 2011. She likes betta fish and orchids, both of which she has repeatedly managed to kill.

John by Wanda Morrow Clevenger

social worker John asked
what was it I thought about
on the long rides up there

he wanted the gory deets
the fill in the down
and dirty blanks

I could tell by how he
leaned back in his chair
he had no better answers
than the rest

nothing at all I said
I stare at the same scenery
or try to sleep but can’t

in his entire social worker career
he hadn’t come across anything
quite like us, I could tell by
how he leaned back
in his chair
and said nothing



Wanda Morrow Clevenger is a Carlinville, Illinois, native who will relatively soon be a Kansas resident. She has published over 300 pieces of work in 122 print and online publications. Her debut book This Same Small Town in Each of Us released in 2011. She likes betta fish and orchids, both of which she has repeatedly managed to kill.

Outside the Church Window by Suzanne Samuels

Outside the church window
Leaves tumble down
Softly as flurries

The leaves don’t know the season
Pale yellow against verdant green

Sunflowers unrelenting
Zucchini ripening
Coreopsis ever blooming 

Still they fall 
Death amidst abundance

Only the most insistent wind
Compels the cascade
In stillness, they cling

I wonder
Was that a trick of the eye?

If I had not seen it
Outside the church window
Then I would not have believed

The way they surrendered
Falling down

Though the sun is overhead
The clock hands at noon
And the threat of winter distant



Suzanne Samuels is at work on her historical novel, The Orphans' Wheel, set in Sicily and New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, among these, Cyclamens and Swords, Cactifur, and Snapdragon.

Niagara Winter by David Jibson

The famous mist had frozen to everything
so solidly that it couldn’t be scraped away
so we sat hunkered inside the car,
shivering with the dampness,
listening to Sarah Vaughn, waiting
for the defrosters to do their work,
talking about the drive ahead
over the Rainbow Bridge into New York
and on to Connecticut,
how we thought the little motel in Ontario
was overpriced for this time of year
until we realized the price was in Canadian dollars
and how the mist frozen to your eyelashes
made you look like a chorus girl -
even at this age.



David Jibson lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan where he is an associate editor of Third Wednesday, a literary arts journal, a member of The Crazy Wisdom Poetry Circle and The Poetry Society of Michigan. He is retired from a long career in Social Work, most recently with a Hospice agency. He believes the most important element in his poetry is "story."